fread (data.table in R) with specification of encoding

Question

Could not find proper answer in previous questions and answers to my problem: 1. I have a 2.3 GB csv file which contains 2.4 million rows of Hebrew Text, currently coded in

Answer 1

As of August 25th the case linked by David Arenburg is closed, and the functionality is included in the currently available version of data.table. The encoding parameter can now be used when calling fread:

text <- fread(file, encoding = 'UTF-8')

ASCII is not an explicit encoding option, but ASCII is valid UTF-8, so you can specify UTF-8 when you want to read your Hebrew text.